Kids love to sing and dance along with their favourite songs, and its fun to watch them with friends putting on a show. Singing along (or lip synching, as most kids seem to do when anyone is watching) is fun, but its even more fun (and definitely more fun for parents) if they can do their own versions. Sing Like a Superstar is a CD designed specifically to allow kids to do their own karaoke versions of popular top 40 songs. Each of the songs contains two tracks – one sung, and one with just the music. After listening to the first one, children can have a try at doing their own version with the music. The versions are all covers, so there are no copyright issues – children can use these for school talent shows, allowing their own singing ability to shine through.

Personally, with the exception of What a Wonderful World (and this is a reasonably bad version of the fabulous Sam Cook original), I don't like any of these songs, though these are reasonably well done covers. This is the worst of pop – with trite, cliched lyrics, poor and often incomprehensible grammar, and messages which aren't necessarily the sort you want children to be singing: “I've been ill of the chain smokers/How you think I go the name hova/I've been real/The game's over” Well, that's modern pop for you. I must be getting old though, since most of the children at my son's school are singing exactly the same stuff in the talent shows and Estedfods. It may be, in any case, a losing battle. Most of these songs are very well known pop hits from the past year or three, including Beyonce's Crazy in Love, the Shannon Knoll cover of What About Me, Delta Goodram's Predictable, Robbie Williams' Better Man, Jennifer Lopez's cover of Gloria Estifan's Let's Get Loud, Justin Timberlake's Rock Your Body, the Pink hit Get the Party Started, Robi Rosa's She Bangs, and the Brittney Spears hit Oops! I Did it Again (it's really unpleasant hearing five year olds sing “I'm not that innocent”). The Karaoke concept is good, and nicely presented, making it easy for your children to be stars, and I really enjoy hearing my children's voices, which, in my very biased view, are much better than the pop stars who made the songs famous. Personally, for a children's CD, I'd prefer more judgement in the selection criteria though, excluding the two or three songs which are inappropriately suggestive for the age group – Crazy in Love and She Bangs in particular.

There may be karaoke CDs which have songs more parent friendly (and perhaps more educational as well), but if you don't personally mind the songs cited above, this one is fine. I'm sure it will get plenty of use, and if you have normal school children, they will most likely already know these songs, and may be singing them with their friends anyway. The dancing and choreography itself is healthy and reasonably educational too, but I highly suggest you have a quick read of the lyrics before purchasing this CD, and make sure that they don't offend you, if not by their suggestiveness, then by the poor quality of the writing (though What a Wonderful World is still a lovely song, even with bad singing and technopop music). This might be the basis for a fun teenybopper party or school fundraiser. For more information visit: http://shop.abc.net.au/browse/product.asp?productid=360370

Sing like a superstar Karaoke ABC Kids Recorded and produced by Juice Music 2004, $A14.95

This review first appeared at Preschool Entertainment. It is reprinted here with permission.